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Zombie Policy on International Family Planning Rises Again

Update 1/31/2017: It turns out the Trump version of the Mexico City Policy is a zombie policy on steroids. The now-released text of the Executive Order will cover all global health funding, not just US family planning funding. This includes PEPFAR, which had been exempted under the George W. Bush administration. (See WhiteHouse.gov, Slate, and UN Dispatch.)

On his first day in the office, President Trump signed an executive order reinstating a 30-year-old political hot potato, the “Mexico City Policy."

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Like many, I will point out that reinstating the global gag rule does not reduce abortion. On the contrary, there is evidence from sub-Saharan Africa that the rule reduced women’s access to contraception between 1994 and 2008, causing more unwanted pregnancies and more abortion. One affected organization, Marie Stopes International, estimates that the loss of US Government funding through reinstatement of the rule will result in 6.5 million unintended pregnancies and 2.2 million abortions, and 21,700 maternal deaths, all related to the scale down of their services in response to the anticipated cuts in US government support.

Views on abortion are strongly held and that’s a fact of life in the United States. But if you want to reduce abortion, this is the wrong way to go. Not only is it empirically counterproductive on its intended policy goal, the gag rule demonstrably causes harm.

Voluntary family planning is one of the great advances of the past century. Anyone with less than 10 children (widely thought to be the limit of natural fertility) will immediately intuit its importance in their own and everyone else’s lives.

And there is what has been empirically documented over decades: enabling women to make informed decisions about whether and when to have children reduces unintended pregnancies, abortion, and maternal and newborn deaths (see here). Family planning also pushes forward women’s economic empowerment (see here), an area where some incoming members of the new Administration have expressed interest.

Family planning is key to global health and development. More than 220 million women who want family planning still don’t have access to contraceptives, information or services in low-income countries.

So if you want to reduce abortion around the world, here’s a better idea: help women in low-income countries gain access to voluntary, high-quality family planning.

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On International Women’s Day it is right to celebrate the huge advances in women’s rights during our own lifetimes. In almost every country in the world, women are closer to achieving equality in economic and social activity. However, even as we celebrate progress, we cannot lose sight of the road still to travel.

Last month, CGD hosted four former directors of USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health to reflect on their experiences, which spanned US administrations from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. (You can watch the event here). Below, we highlight three main takeaways— the critical role of technical leadership, the importance of data, and the need to start with the end in mind when planning for successful transitions.

Marie-Claude Bibeau, Canadian Minister of International Development and La Francophonie, on Canada's new feminist international assistance policy, the need for psychosocial support for refugees, and the links between family planning and development.

Modern contraception may be the single most important technology for development—it liberates women to think ahead, as men have always been able to do. Last month, CGD hosted the Third Annual Birdsall House Conference on Women: “Reproductive Choices to Life Chances: New and Existing Evidence on the Impact of Contraception on Women’s Empowerment.” The conference featured presentations from some of the world’s top scholars.